Editorial Reviews
Book Description
In the northern Indian state of Kumaon, villagers set hundreds of forest fires in the early 1920s, protesting the colonial British state’s regulations to protect the environment. Yet by the 1990s they had begun to conserve their forests carefully. In his innovative historical and political study, Arun Agrawal analyzes this striking transformation. He describes and explains the emergence of environmental identities and changes in state-locality relations and shows how the two are related. In so doing, he demonstrates that scholarship on common property, political ecology, and feminist environmentalism can be combined-in an approach he calls environmentality-to better understand changes in conservation efforts. Such an understanding is relevant far beyond Kumaon; local populations in more than fifty countries are engaged in similar efforts to protect their environmental resources.
Agrawal brings environment and development studies, new institutional economics, and Foucauldian theories of power and subjectivity to bear on his ethnographical and historical research. He visited nearly forty villages in Kumaon, where he examined local records, assessed the state of village forests, and interviewed hundreds of Kumaonis. Based on his extensive fieldwork and archival research, he shows how decentralization strategies change relations between states and localities, community decision-makers and common residents, and individuals and the environment. In exploring these changes and their significance, Agrawal establishes that theories of environmental politics are enriched by attention to the connections between power, knowledge, institutions, and subjectivities.
From the Back Cover
“Arun Agrawal achieves, in Environmentality, something of a breakthrough to new analytical territory where the binaries of state and society, structure and agency, public and private are transcended. He parlays the humble subject of community-based forestry and Foucault’s concept of ‘governentality’ into the makings of an original and subtle analysis of modernity and nature.”-James C. Scott, Yale University
“Arun Agrawal has written an amazing book that draws on a very long-term case study to make general lessons. He analyzes the development of the mentality of citizens and officials related to the environment in a particular setting undergoing major shifts from centralization to a form of decentralization. All of us can take some important lessons from this book about how people’s mentalities change when they have power and knowledge to cope with a problem. That shift in knowledge and power took time and effort, but is one of the rare success stories of recent history.”-Elinor Ostrom, coeditor of Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Human-Environment Interactions in Forest Ecosystems
Environmentality : Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century),Arun Agrawal,Duke University Press,0822334925,Anthropology - Cultural,Business / Economics / Finance,Decision making,Development - Sustainable Development,Environmental management,Environmental policy,Forest conservation,General,India,Nature,Nature/Ecology,Public Policy - Environmental Policy,Environmental Studies,Political Science/General and,Sanitary & municipal engineering,South Asian Studies
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